ART STUFF ON A TRAIN 101-110

ART STUFF on a train # 110: ‘The Other End of the Journey’

                        Malcolm Crocker: 'Never Forever 1', 50 x 70 cm

I live in Southampton, even if I’m in London most daylight hours. Recently, though, it’s been well worth attending to my home scene. The City Art Gallery, which has been going since 1939, has one of the best permanent collections, though also the shortest opening hours, of our regional museums. A welcome survey of Dan Holdsworth’s photographs has just opened, and the Gallery is also showing the accomplished young local artist Greg Gilbert as has the recently re-provisioned showcase of Southampton’s ‘other university’ – Solent. Gilbert is one of five artists who considered Southampton as muse, even if the catalogue self-deprecatingly quotes Laurie Lee’s 1934 complaint that he didn’t see the sea as promised, just ‘a few rusty cranes’ and ‘a muddy river which they said was Southampton Water’. Meanwhile the old university’s well-respected John Hansard Gallery, on the Highfield campus a couple of miles out, is due to close early next year and reopen more centrally in late 2016 as part of an ambitious arts complex which has been in prospect for over a decade. Moreover, the experimental scene also has two spaces in former shops in the run down St Mary’s area: enterprising recent art graduates  have formed the HA HA and Orb galleries. The latter currently has Malcolm Crocker's impressive retro-futurist landscapes. So there’s plenty to be said for a day in Southampton. I would say ‘come and see me’ but I doubt if I’d be there…

* Liv Fontaine, a performance artist who co-runs the space, features in my current London show ‘Weight for the Showing’ (at Maddox Arts, to 13 June, since you ask).



Liv Fontaine in ‘Plinth Piece’ – performance at Maddox Arts, 23 April 2015, to be repeated 8 pm on 22 May

109: ‘Uncrushed Dreams’

Brian Dawn Chalkly: ‘My dreams get crushed on a regular basis. I guess that’s down to the life I’m living’, 2012 – Watercolour on paper – 42 x 59

Who’s the best transvestite artist in the country? Grayson Perry is, of course, much the most famous, not just as an artist, but as a media figure, especially when dressed as Claire. But to my taste the better artist is Brian Dawn Chalkley, similar enough in inclinations to have accompanied Perry to the Torture Garden back in the day. Leading the MA at Chelsea College as Brian and going out as Dawn by night, he’s an abstract painter who turned to performance, film and – latterly – figurative watercolours. His slightly washed-out paintings of women look a little naïve at first, but there’s lots going on: having sourced a photographic starting point with the right air of anxiety, Chalkley then designs clothes to suit how he sees his ostensible subjects’ personalities – often still referencing abstract art – and then follows a parallel process to decide on a background. A disjointed allure results, pointed up by the lengthy titles quoting from fashion magazines. They gesture towards fleshing out the character but leave us wondering if it’s all a pretence – which it might very well be, for these paintings also represent Chalkley’s own dreams of how he’d like to be, of the act he’d like to pull off. You can see six of Chalkley’s paintings in a three person show (with Jacqueline Utley and Charles Williams at Studio 1.1 to 31 May) which is themed around the construction of narratives.

                        Brian as Dawn

Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 108: ‘Apple Barnacle Orgasm’

Shimabaku sharpening his Apple

It’s wonderful what obscure byways you can be drawn into if you visit a few shows. Just sticking to natural history:

How do you cut an apple with an apple? Shimabaku makes it look easy at Wilkinson (to 17 May, with the bonus of a brilliant set of paintings by Marcin Maciejowski). He sharpens the side of his Macbook Air to a guillotine finish before wielding it on the fruit. So if you crave thematically murderous revenge on a computer addict…


Salvatore Arancio: ‘Holes’ 2015, calcite, epoxy resin, pigment, epoxy modeling compound, pain

What’s going on in the world of barnacles? London hasn’t has a good barnacle show since Paul Delafield Cook at Purdy Hicks in 2013, which makes Salvatore Arancio’s ceramics at the Contemporary Art Society (to 28 Aug) a particular pleasure. That counters the recent news that the teeth the mobile limpet uses to cling to a rock contain the strongest naturally occurring substance yet discovered, which had threatened to rather overshadow the fixed spot barnacle.



Moussa Sar: still from ‘L’Orgasme du Singe’, 2007

Do female monkeys have orgasms? The verdict is out in wild practice, but all female mammals have a clitoris, and all primates can be artificially stimulated to such behaviours – hyperventilation, spasms, clutching, eversion of the lips, panting vocalization – as are demonstrated by the French African video artist Moussa Sar in the racially charged ‘L’Orgasme du Singe’ at Cecilia Brunson Projects (to 8 May), one of a group of punchy little plays to camera which also include an insect impersonation which comfortably outdoes Isabella Rossellini on ‘The Sex Life of Insects’.

Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 107: ‘Grids Gone Dotty’

Isa Genzken: ‘Geldbild VVIII’, 2014


These two paintings are both made up of circular elements similarly distributed – 50 and 100 respectively. Neither involves the application of paint by the artist, but that aside the production processes are quite different. Isa Genzken (at Hauser & Wirth to 10 May) has made money paintings (‘Geldbilder’) most of which combine banknotes with coins, photographs of the artist and other material from the studio – a novel security issue, as a €50 note might well be worth detaching in an unobserved moment. One room – which I prefer – employs coins only to generate a more pared back and original abstract aesthetic. Their potential regularity is disrupted by somewhat haphazard application, the range of coins, the paint or tarnish on some, substitution of washers , and the odd coin being represented only by the mark of where it used to be. Meanwhile, one of the consistently sized 304.8cm square paintings – 10 feet in old money – in Jonathan Horowitz’s show (Sadie Coles to 30 May) was made by sending out a small canvas to 100 different people were asked to make an unmeasured free hand approximation of an 8 inch black disc. The variety of sizes so produced makes for a subjective riff on a early Bridget Riley or – more pertinently, given that versions of his mirrors are also in the show, Roy Lichtenstein’s Ben-Day dots. Both counter the expectation that money is paid for skilful product of the painter’s hand: Genzken by making cash the subject and substance as well as one of the objects of the work; Horowitz by outsourcing the painting in the more radical way than does, say, Jeff Koons – it’s not that the substitution of others’ efforts is a practical matter to achieve production on the scale desired, nor that higher levels of skill can be bought in , but that the very effects the artist seeks would be lost were he to make the work himself.


             

              Jonathan Horowitz: ‘One Hundred Dots’, 2015

Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 106: ‘Batchelor of Books’

David Batchelor: from ‘The October Colouring-In Book’

The Whitechapel’s fascinating 100 artist ‘Adventures of the Black Square’ included a framed display of David Batchelor’s version of the first ever issue of October magazine, now published as ‘The October Colouring-In Book’. The magazine announced itself to be plain of aspect and devoid of colour, as befitting a heavyweight theoretical journal – so Batchelor* cocks a snook by colouring in one side of every page, adopting a range of circular, triangular and rectangular motifs to achieve a varied rhythm. That makes for 58 sheets of geometric rainbow interventions. It’s unashamedly attractive in just the way October would have dismissed, and also undermines its template’s textual intent by reducing readability to the margins. Batchelor’s tactics here fit in with his widely-cited ‘Chromophobia’ (2000), a polemic in favour of colour as a serious matter too often dismissed as frippery. And Batchelor’s ‘Monochrome Archive, 1997-2015’ remains at the Whitechapel to 3 May. His 2010 book ‘Found Monochromes’ collected 250 photographs of white rectangles. Batchelor now has 500, and has expanded his range to include black. They are superbly displayed as large slow slide shows in horizontal and vertical formats; small rapid fire screens; and the original slides backlit on a display table. They point to the origins of geometric abstraction in the city, represent a contemplative pause amidst its noise, and also call attention the peripheral surrounding views we might easily have ignored.

* See ‘Chromophobia’ (Reaktion Books, 2000 – £12.95), ‘Found Monochromes, Vol.1, 1–250’ (Ridinghouse, 2010 – £28) and ‘The October Colouring-In Book’ (Ridinghouse, 2015 – £12)



David Batchelor: ‘Found Monochrome No. 57 – Stoke Newington, London 20-09-02′

Most days art critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in London. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?

Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 105: ‘Game of the Name’

‘Patron: Experiments in Colour #2′ 2015 – Collaborative work in which Sinta Tantra paints Nick Hornby’s sculptural form.

Given that artists are brands of a sort, it would be no surprise if having the right name can impact on the chances of success. Ideally, I reckon, a name should be memorable, distinctive (so Internet searches lead to the artist rather than an ersatz name sharer); and easy to spell and pronounce – though a little bit of mystery does no harm, enabling initiates to feel they’re in the know (‘actually it’s Rew-shay’ / ‘Zee’ / ‘Yoost’, collectors of Ed Rusha, Sarah Sze or Jesper Just can point out). That said, Pierre Huyghe (say ‘Hweeg’) may have taken that a little too far, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (‘a-pih-CHAT-pong Weer-uh-suh-THA-cull) has surely found success in spite of his name. ‘John Smith’, in contrast, fails the distinctiveness test comprehensively enough, perhaps, to be memorable: the filmmaker told me he knew he was gaining traction when someone referred to him as ‘THE John Smith’! Something which Nick Hornby (not the novelist, but the artist) must suffer in reverse. Ai Wei-Wei has cracked it, but Chinese artists are confusing for Westerners – I struggle to separate my Liu Xiaodong from Chen Xiaoyun, my Xu Bing from Lu Ding. It makes you wonder why more artists don’t change their names, as did, say, Marcus Rothkowitz, Vostanik Adoian and Alfred Schulze*. So what is the ideal name? Damien Hirst has a good one** – simple yet unusual with thematic hints of devilry and death (is a car-driven coffin ‘hearsed’?). And Blue Curry, Rae Hicks and Sinta Tantra, for example, are young British artists who won’t be able to blame their names if they don’t become famous.

* Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky and Wols

** Luke Gottelier suggested on seeing that that Man Ray has the simplest and most memorable art name. He may be right...



‘Patron: Experiments in Colour #2′ 2015 – angle 2

Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 104: ‘Not Quite Shangri-La’

Shezad Dawood: ‘Three Arrangements for Annabel & Cello’, 2015 – digital video, 9:30, ed of 7
Image courtesy Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London. Copyright the artist.

You might have thought that Shezad Dawood had had his London moment with last spring’s comprehensive solo at the Parasol Unit… But no, you could recently see the Indian-Pakistani-Irish-English artist in three places with varied work not included in that show. He has a three-floor-spanning textile commission at Sadler’s Wells (to 26 April). Pippy Houldsworth’s subsidiary one work exhibition in the innovative series ‘The Box’ is Dawood’s new film ‘Three Arrangements for Annabel and Cello’, a seductive conjunction of shadowplay, music, dance and cultural undertones, which hides and reveals performer and model Annabel Hornsby in three scenarios over nine minutes (to 11 April). And Dawood has just featured in fig-2, the ICA’s rapid-turn programme of 50 projects over 50 weeks. His contribution centred on the animation ‘The Room’, a deadpan and somewhat wacky satire of utopian aspiration through the banter of two monk-like figures, Brother P and Brother S. They laugh off the sexual excess and sadistic violence of their respective pasts before discussing the true nature of Shangri-La. It’s virtual, they concur, though not for the obvious reason that it’s a 1930’s fiction, but as a way of showing their own superior understanding. Yet they still get tied up in knots as they try to decide whether and how the mythical valley gets bigger to accommodate increasing numbers of adepts. Perhaps in Shangri-La all artists would get an equal number of shows, but for now Brother S seems inequitably blessed.



Shezad Dawood, 2015. Installation image of fig-2 exhibition, week 13/50. Courtesy of the artist.
Photography by Sylvain Deleu. 

Most days art critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in London. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?

Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 103: ‘Foolish at the Tate?’

Dan Flavin: ‘Untitled (to Alan Shepard in honour of the upward and downward journey)’, 1984

I’ve mentioned before that it’s worth keeping an eye on the changing presentation of the Tate’s permanent collections. Here are two recent acquisitions which play off everyday materials to question what constitutes an artwork – just the sort of purchase which used to derided as foolish, but is now accepted as an interesting part of the conceptual story. Dan Flavin’s 1960’s and 70’s light works have been widely shown here, but ‘hooded’ lights have never been seen in Britain before – so it’s real coup to have acquired the significant installation Untitled (to Alan Shepard in honour of the upward and downward journey), 1984, for just £1.6m. The title, as well its dedication to the Apollo 14 astronaut, eschatologically reinforces the anticipation of death which critics have generally read into the dark wood coverings which obscure the upper surfaces of Flavin’s characteristic standard neon tubes in this late series. Thomas Hirschhorn’s Interior Facement, 1999, by way of contrast, is an early work. For some years now the intensely theoretical Swiss artist has rendered objects more equal by covering them in brown duct tape – a material chosen for the political point made by its lack of inherent value. This security camera from 1999, however, is wrapped in black insulation tape, indicative of how Hirschhorn had not yet settled on duct tape, and was also more willing to isolate a single charged object from its surrounding network of philosophical implications. So, if you’re in the Tate this morning*, look out for more than Marlene Dumas.

* Published 1 April, 2015



Thomas Hirschhorn: ‘Interior Facement’, 1999

Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 102: ‘The Use of Painting’

Luke Gottelier in his best painting kit with themed bookselves

Really, what’s the use of painting? Successful works just take up wall space which could have been used for shelving – possibly the fun-shelves, suited to their books, which Luke Gottelier has put up at DOLPH project space in Streatham: Manzoni monographs on a white shelf, Kippenberger on a scrappy construction, Warhol on a mix of silver and transparency etc. Failed paintings must be even further down the value chain. Yet Gottelier (also at FOLD’s new space in Fitzrovia, to 18 April) gives his rejected works a practical role: as ashtray, toy vehicle, electric guitar… Or does he? The first problem is that the process generates a ramshackle purposefulness which is in danger of falling back into art value. The second is that he’s just as likely to torture the earmarked set of 39 failed works from 2004-05, suffocating one in toxic gold paint, lighting another up with fireworks – and planning to conclude his time at DOLPH (where he’s at home with his books to 28 March) by covering a painting with catnip and letting a performing hoard of tabbies do their worst.That’s typical of how Gottelier works: he’s fired by decidedly wacky ideas – what if he sticks neckties onto paintings / aims at the ugliest possible portrait / makes a hairy painting / attacks his old work? – which then drive him into the search for the formal and practical solutions. And that’s what maintains his – and our – interest. Maybe that’s the use of painting, after all.

Luke Gottelier: ‘Firework Display’, 2005-2015 – Fireworks, wood, oil paint, painting

Paul’s ART STUFF on a Train # 101: ‘I Fink it’s a Face’

Graham Fink (at Riflemaker to 21 March) is a pareidolian: he sees faces all over the place. That’s picked up in witty photographs which land somewhere between gestalt and abstraction by discovering visages in peeling walls, clouds and rock formations etc. True, I’ve seen that done before, but the surprising variety and specificity which Fink discovers gives his images an extra dimension. He displays a selection of these on monumentalising slabs of marble. Fink finds it natural to draw faces, and has taken to doing so using only his eyes, into which an infrared light is shone in a development of marketing researchers’ well-established eye tracking technology, as used to find out what attracts the viewer of an advert. To date he’s ‘drawn’ those faces mainly from his imagination, but I caught him essaying a portrait using the technique, which makes more sense to me: the act of looking is translated directly into a representation made with no ‘middle man’ in the form of hands. Impressive as Fink’s abilities are given the method, the drawings look hesitant and scratchy, even when they, too, are given marble import. There’s something alluring about the directness achieved, though, which makes one wonder whether some sort of essence is being revealed. In his spare time, incidentally, Fink is Chief Creative Officer for China at the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather – and his most famous advert sees hundreds of people form… a face.




Most days art critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in London. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?

BERLIN ONE YEAR BACK

Perhaps I should have been in Berlin the first week in May: but here were my impressions from last year of the sort of thing I might be missing, concnetrating for STATE magazine on the British presence...


THE BRITISH IN BERLIN

The two most visible symbols, now very little of the Berlin Wall  remains, of the old East are the tower at Alexanderplatz and the design of the crossing point green man

The Berlin Art Weekend on 1-3 May 2014 featured the coordinated opening of shows by fifty of the city's leading galleries on Friday night, followed by extended hours through  Saturday and Sunday. Berlin doesn't have a conventional art fair, so this becomes effectively 'Frieze Week without Frieze', with private collections, public institutions and the many other galleries upping their game in parallel. 
 

There aren't quite the contrasts there were 20 years ago, but you can still find the gritty and the high-end in conjunction

Such profusion can be overwhelming, and just a thematic sample provides plenty – for example, the British in Berlin. There were ten solo shows by Britons, six of them at the 'official' fifty galleries. I spotted a third of the 29 Turner Prize winners to date in group shows – though one of them, Wolfgang Tillmans, is a German who lives in Berlin. Plenty of other British artist and gallerists have moved there.

 Martin Boyce: Forest Fire, 2012 - Chromed steel and Grill Chef barbecue

The weather was good… Martin Boyce’s barbecue edition Forest Fire  (Johnen Galerie) might have come in handy: they’re his most light-hearted play yet on the shapes derived from concrete trees designed by Joël and Jan Martel in 1925 - ready here to be linked to nature and architecture along with the appropriate fuel of charcoal. 

 Marco di Goivanni: Performance at Mila Kunstgalerie

Where would be at such weekends without an eccentric performance or two (here’s Marco di Goivanni as pipeman); rooms filled with such matter as rickety bison (Lutz Bacher), rubbish bins (Klara Liden), beeswax (Wolfgang Laib) or popcorn (Michael Sailstorfer); and a nice present for the wife  - perhaps, to continue that last theme, one of Pae White’s £750 popcorn necklaces in ceramic and gold? 

 'Untitled (Across)', 2014

Robert Holyhead at Galerie Max Hetzler 

Robert Holyhead (born Trowbridge, 1974) has shown extensively in London in recent years, but the fifteen new oils (about 60 x 40 cm)  in his Berlin debut brought a new authority – and popularity at £9,500 - to his abstract language. He  mixes the fluid and the sharp with landscape resonances: in Untitled (Across) two dots appear to be traversing a cliffy vista, achieving Holyhead’s goal of ‘both a type of personal language and some familiarity with the world’.

 Installation view with Walking Woman, 2014

       Julian Opie at Krobath and Gerhardsen Gerner   

Julian Opie was the only artist with two solo shows, both concentrating mainly on his technique of plotting movement by filming people on the street and converting the data, life size, into his familiar linear shorthand. Krobath had the colour, in both static and moving versions. Gerner had the better location, with a woman in double-sided black and white strolling along the bank of the River Spree, accompanied by three other simplified animations: fish, boats and trees.

 'Building', 2012

      Merlin James at Aanant & Zoo

Glasgow-based Welsh painter Merlin James is known for his gently astute probing the language of painting often linked to memories of people and place, by such means as incorporating the frame, using a transparent ground and attaching objects.  Naturally there was plenty of that in this 36 work retrospective, but there was also one of his less often seen series of ‘sex paintings’, which push the intimacy further whilst distancing the viewer through the paradox of close-up.

Jonathan Monk: Paul together alone with each other (Sgt. Pepper) at the Hamburger Bahnhof

The ex-railway station’s vast main space echoed to a Susan Phillipsz’ soundpiece, above which  sat Jonathan Monk’s playful literalising of his own tendency to confuse Paul McCarthy with Paul McCartney by dressing the American master of messy extremity in the ex-Beatle’s Sergeant Pepper suit.  The puppet was originally shown gazing into the mirror, which had now fallen and smashed, giving the figure a somewhat forlorn air – perhaps at Monk’s theme: the inevitability of misunderstandings.

  Adam McEwen: Factory Tint at Capitain Petzel

New York based Adam McEwen (born 1965) has no London gallery, but has become one of the most successful artists from London. His solo debut with Capitain Petzel had fifteen life-size photographs of stretch limos, lined up vertically as if terminally parked; a collection of escalator steps scattered round the floor; and, in the basement, endless loops of the path through - but never out of - the four car tunnels which connect Manhattan to the mainland. So much aspiration to be elsewhere, disappointed, made the elegant space on Karl-Marx-Allee a good place to be.

     
     Richard Wright: Nine Chains To The Moon (Chapter 2) at BQ

Richard Wright has a changing year-long residency at Jörn Bötnagel and Yvonne Quirmbach’s space. The second phase included his choice of works by fellow Britons Tony Swain and John Latham. Wright showed paintings on pages from books, and had covered the outside of the gallery with a collage of posters: it was only in the conservatory-like Pavilion of the Volksbuhne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz just over the road that he’d made one of his characteristic  temporary wall drawings. 

 A visitor approaches Chadwick's 'Crouching Beast 1', 1990

Lynn Chadwick at Blain / Southern

On the centenary of his birth, British gallerists Harry Blain and Graham Southern are running a London - New York – Berlin blockbuster designed to lift Lynn Chadwick out of his middle market position to prices more comparable to those of his contemporaries, Hepworth and Moore.  The Berlin leg delivered on spectacle, with his big geometric beasts ranged round an impressive space also viewable from a balcony two floors up. 

  Tacita Dean: Quatemary, 2014 at Niels Borch Jensens Editions

Berlin is a good place for artists to live: cheap rents, good studio spaces, lots of galleries, a vibrant art community. Tacita Dean is among the resident British artists, and she launched this 6.5m wide edition over the Gallery Weekend. Quatemary is a landscape of post-apocalpytic ruin, constructed from found 19th Century albumen prints merged with the artist’s writings and drawings. It refers to the Yellowstone supervolcano, which has no means of release but, according to Dean, will wipe out several American states instantly if it does blow, after which the ash cloud would cause a worldwide ice age. It did blow 2.1m, 1.3m and 640,000 years ago, so Dean's vision has some plausibility...

       Kate Steciw at  Neumeister Bar-Am

STATE readers with razor sharp memories may recall that Ché Zara Blomfield’s project space in a Bethnal Green basement  featured when I chose ten new galleries of interest a couple of years back. She was then showing adventurous New Yorker  Kate Steciw, who uses the networked images as raw material for photographs which become objects. Now Ché’s in Berlin, ready to set up her own space shortly and working at Neumeister Bar-Am… who’re showing Steciw: five stock images are rearranged along with chains, wheels, magnets etc to turn ubiquities into an installation of great verve.

      
      Alan Charlton: Triangle Painting, 2012 at Konrad Fischer

From 1972 onwards, when he first showed them at Konrad Fisher itself, Alan Charlton has stuck to grey paintings - hinting, perhaps, at his Sheffield childhood. They come on spruce frames 4.5 cm deep, their sides in multiples of 4.5 cm. Those constraints are intended to cast the objecthood of his paintings and their relation to the surrounding space into maximally sharp relief. The triangle has become a favoured form of late, and Charlton had a show of nothing else in Fischer's main space in 2012. This one is at the darker end of the various greys which Charlton mixes afresh from multiple colours for each painting.

     Stephan J. Englisch: Café Achteck # 5, Schloßstraße at Gallery Bart, Amsterdam

There was a ten gallery mini-fair on the theme ‘I AMsterdam YOU BErlin’: one of the five Dutch participants had a set of night photographs of Berlin’s so-called ‘octagonal cafés’ – which is to say, elegant nineteenth century pissoirs in the city’s squares.  Only 16 of these green metal structures remain from a peak population of a hundred. But if they do disappear, then these atmospheric long exposures will provide a worthy record. True, the photographer was British by name rather than by his German nationality...   

Cerith Wyn Evans: Untitled, 2008 at the Boros Bunker

The most impressive private collection the latest selection from the Boros Collection in the Bunker constructed in 1943 to shelter up to 3,000 from air raids: five floors plus a new penthouse on top, concrete walls up to two metres thick, formerly a prison (1945-49), fruit store (1957-91) and night club (1992-96). The Boros policy of buying and showing emerging artists in depth led to impressive multi-room surveys of such as Alicia Kadje, Danh Vo and Thea Djordjadze among only 21 artists shown across 80 rooms... and just the one Briton: Cerith Wyn Evans, with an incandescent column and photographs from which circles had been tellingly removed. 

 The Reichsbahnbunker

Images courtesy of the relevant galleries and artists +  Jan Brockhaus (James), Little & Large Editions (Boyce), NOSHE (Evans)

THE PRECEDENT FOR ART15

Here,  ahead of the 150 gallery ART15 (Olympia in Kensington Thurs 21 - Sat 23 May), are the chioces I made for STATE magazine from last year's edition...

ART14 SHAPES UP

Art14’s USP was its geographical breadth (tagline: ‘London’s global art fair’), reflecting a much more balanced representation between continents than at, for example, Frieze. This year it was also big, with 180 galleries despite nearly half of the inaugural 120  not returning. I had thought this might result in a more cramped environment, but not so: more of Olympia’s vast hall was opened up, though that did mean that much was under a low roof rather than below the expansive Victorian structure. That spaciousness enabled ART14 to maintain a strength in sculptural work, and was a boon when the crowds came. The fair was  literally humming on the Sunday, when not only was it busy but performance artist Leah Capaldi had actors sprinkled around with instructions to pass on a hum. The Fair as a whole was wildly uneven. With most of the 25 special projects dotted around being sculptural in nature – including work by the highest profile artists, Ai Wei Wei and Yinka Shonibare - and with gallerists having room to show large pieces if they wished, I was more drawn to sculpture than to anything else.

Alison Wilding: Bedrocked, 2013 at Karsten Schubert, London

Alison Wilding, who was shortlisted for the Turner prize as long ago as 1992 and also contributed a sculpture project, is known for the sensuous appreciation of material qualities which this stacked work demonstrates. That ball is balanced purely by being part-filled with stabilising sand. It sits on an impressive parallelepiped of marbled alabaster, the weight of which seems to make less of an impression than expected on the car tyre beneath. Why so? Because it's actually the solid rubber cast of a tyre, and so suited to the paradoxical role of non-rock rock-bearing bedrock.

Santiago Villanueva: Untitled # 40, 2010, from the series 'Soft Therapy',  at Diana Lowenstein Gallery, Miami

Mallorcan-based Santiago Villanueva (born Madrid, 1964) makes gleaming organic shapes of Styrofoam, fiberglass and lacquer, hang from the artist’s steel fittings to make an attention-grabbing front-of-stand. Energised by seeming to be just at the point it glops down to the floor, there’s also a tension between the sleek surface and an intestinal echo – are we inside or outside the body? Villaneuva says his aim is ‘a soft skin of industrial manufacture crystallizing the internal organic emotions’.

Piers Secunda: Painting of a Wuhan Mountain (Blitz damaged), 2013/14 at the Updown Gallery, Ramsgate

Back in the 80’s, the Victoria & Albert Museum’s collection of Chinese sculpture left a strong impression on the teenage Piers Secunda. Adopting the way in which traditional Chinese painters conjure landscapes out of memory and imagination, he sets a fantastically calibrated hanging monastery in dramatic mountains, the back of which are formed by a cast of a shrapnel-damaged former wall of the V&A, as bombed in World War II.   Oh, did I mention that this optimistic tale of fragility's survival, like most of Secunda’s work, is made out of paint?

Johanna Calle: Perspectivas (05), 2012 at Ivo Kamm Kunstsalon & Galerie, Zurich

These very economical works from the Colombian Johanna Calle (born 1965) are simply bird cages squashed against the wall. Yes, that’s a neat way of supressing the modernist grid, but Calle also makes a double reference to life in her home country: first, she symbolically prevents the imprisonment of at least one bird from the indigenous species, many of which are threatened - all too often kept as pets despite being endangered species. Second, she protests the very cramped housing conditions in which the typical Bogotán lives.

Mohsen Vaziri-Moghaddamm: Pardis, 2007 at Meshkati Fine Art, London

Mohsen Vaziri-Moghaddamm has divided his life between Iran and Italy (1955-64 and 1985 to date – he’s a very energetic 90). Lionised in Tehran, he remains little-known here despite a major show at the ICA in 1968, and an impressive back catalogue notable for its sand paintings and immense moveable constructions from the 1970’s, They were best altered with the help of a ladder, but this later domestically scaled version of Pardis (‘Paradise’) - comparable with Lygia Clark’s bichos - was displayed in a set-up resembling an animal, but could easily be switched around by hand. 

Mat Chivers: Syzygy, 2011 at Millennium Gallery, St Ives

Devon-based Mat Chivers likes to strip the world back to elementals and to render traditional subjects with the most modern techniques. This impressive two part sculpture starts with a stacked cumulus cloud, rendered paradoxically weighty in what he told me was as big a piece of alabaster as you're likely to find, given how it grows in cloud-like nuggets. It's rendered through a computerised translation into thousands of triangles, which were then reduced down to the most essential 56 faces for the Indian black granite version. 'Syzygy'? But of course, a poetic term for the combination of two metrical feet into a single unit...

He An: He Tao Yun, 2013 at Tang Contemporary, Beijing

In a striking combination of nostalgia for his roots amidst China’s rapid change and a vandalistic attack on the new, He An (born in Wuhan, at 10m the most populous city in Central China, in 1971) commissioned the theft from shop signs of the three neon characters making up his father’s name: He Tao Yun. The damage to the still-operative lighting from its being hacked away gives the resulting floor sculpture a ramshackle aesthetic at effective odds with the futuristic connotations of neon.

Kai Klahre: Tower Guard, 2013 at maerzgalerie, Leipzig

When painters diversify into sculptures derived from their painted motifs, the results can seem merely illustrative (see e.g. de Chirico or Dali), but I found the still-painterly structure forced onto Kai Klare’s atmospheric pictures by his recent turn to small-scale aluminium, plastic and concrete sculptures focused the charge from his faintly mythic figures. They seem adrift between modernity and the forests and history of East Germany with which Klahre (born 1981) grew up. Is this a teenager ignoring the potential of a listening tower in favour of her own headphoned world?
 

Zhao Zhao: Waterfall, 2013 in ART14 Projects / Alexander Ochs Galleries Berlin | Beijing

Zhao Zhao was Ai Wei Wei’s assistant for seven years, and like him comes from a family which was exiled to the north western desert during the Cultural Revolution. At 31, he’s now making a significant impact of his own through work as wide-ranging as Ai’s, and has himself fallen out with the Chinese authorities. 'Waterfall' is a replica of the Chinese Emperor’s throne from the Qing-Dynasty (1662-1722): by covering it in dripping red wax, Zhao suggests blood and implies a continuity of repression between Imperial and Maoist regimes, which both adopted the colour.

Morten Viskum: The Collector, 2013 at Son Espace, Girona (Spain) & Vestfossen (Norway)

Vestfossen resident Morten Viskum had one of the more outlandish practices on display. He makes a life-sized realist portrait every February, showing himself in guises from Christ to bodybuilder to clown to this 2013 version as a collector, holding in his hand the 700 page catalogue for Viskum's own extensive holdings of art. So what are those tasteful near-monochrome exercises in subtle graduation behind his statue and its model? Just that, except they’re painted as performances, and not with the artist’s hand but the severed hand of a dead man which Viskum uses as a paintbrush.   

Lakin Ogunbanwo: Untitled (1), 2013 at Rocke & Van Wyk, Johannesburg

True, this is not a sculpture, but young self-taught Nigerian Lakin Ogunbanwo achieves a maximally sculptural photographic effect through the simple devices of olive oil, dramatic lighting and life-sized prints of a gleamingly chiselled model. The chin is very much the point, proving a punch which chimes with Ogunbanwo’s parallel work in fashion photography, as did a colour set of black women with the prominent contrast of cherry red lipstick.

 

  

Židrija Janušait: Life consists of these little touches of solitude in Performance Projects / Gallery Memo Parkus, Kaunas, Lithuaina

 The performance programme included Lithuanian Židrija Janušait being thethered to a wall either side by assistants armed with white thread, as if the artist were refracting beams of light. The accompanying quotation from Roland Barthes brought memory and communication into play, recounting how he ‘happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother Jerome, taken in 1852’. Barthes was blown away by the thought that he was ‘looking at the eyes which looked at the Emperor’, but found that few shared his amazement: ‘life consists of these little touches of solitude’.